In a recent edition of the Early Adopter Research (EAR) podcast, EAR’s Dan Woods spoke with Mike McConnell about a crucial topic in cybersecurity, authentication. McConnell is the former head of the NSA, and an expert in cybersecurity, especially in getting governments and nations to do a better job. He is also one of more than 30 contributors to the upcoming book from Fortinet CISO Phil Quade called The Digital Big Bang: The Hard Stuff, the Soft Stuff, and the Future of Cybersecurity. The Digital Big Bang book puts forth a big history style explanation of cybersecurity. Phil Quade proposes a framework for creating a truly scientific approach to cybersecurity. Quade’s ambition is to find a way to systematically address many of the problems that have risen up because cybersecurity was not properly incorporated into the design of the internet. Woods is a technology analyst and founder of earlyadopter.com, a research publication that focuses on high value use cases and how to create multi-product platforms to implement them. He played the role of editor for Phil Quade’s book, which came out in preview at Fortinet’s Accelerate conference in April 2019 and should be published by John Wiley by August. Their conversation covered:
* 4:30 - Why authentication is the most important cybersecurity building block
* 11:00 - The four dimensions of cybersecurity communications
* 22:00 - The need to be proactive in cybersecurity
